


lovers in the backseat

by xylodemon



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 1930s, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-05 23:58:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xylodemon/pseuds/xylodemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no room for Jon in Chicago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lovers in the backseat

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Livin' On a Prayer: an Americana ficathon](http://sister-wife.livejournal.com/15920.html) for the [prompt](http://sister-wife.livejournal.com/15920.html?thread=103472#t103472) _Jon/Ygritte, baby we were born to run_. 
> 
> This is a modern AU set during the Depression Era crime wave, so beware bank robbery and other assorted villainy. Title from the Scissor Sisters.

There's no room for Jon in Chicago; he's just a mistake his father made before he got married, a dirty secret that needs to be kept hidden, an embarrassment for an upstanding family like the Starks, a family with old money and good breeding and ties to the Baratheon mayor's office.

Jon stays out of the way as best he can, keeps his head down until he can't anymore.

Bran comes down with polio over the summer, spends August growing weaker and weaker, and it breaks the uneasy truce Jon has with his father's wife. Catelyn finally lets her resentment bubble to the surface, her temper flaring past barbed silences and dark looks; she says things that keep Jon awake at night, twisting an ache into his chest that's sharper than a knife.

Jon drops out of school, stays out late, makes friends with some guys he meets at the pool hall, the kind of friends who don't ask questions, don't have parents, don't care about last names. Jon isn't really as Stark, and these guys aren't really a gang, just a few kids trying to make cash on the quick. They stick to small time shit for the most part -- moving packages, standing lookout, selling hubcaps as scrap -- but Jon gets tired of it after three or four months. He wants something more than spending money, wants enough to rent his own place, find a girl, make some kind of a life.

He gets arrested stealing a car on his sixteenth birthday, a flashlight glaring through the window as he's twisting the wires under the dash, but his father makes it go away, doesn't need another stain on the family honor.

 

+

 

His uncle drives up from Texas when Ned announces he's going to run for alderman. Benjen looks dirty and rough, wearing a Stetson and duster like something out of Arya's Zane Grey novels, and Jon packs a bag, asks him if he'd like company on the ride home.

"You'll keep your nose clean if you're living with me," Benjen says quietly, a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth as they cross into Missouri. "You step out of line once, and I'll put you on the next bus back to Chicago."

Jon stares out the Model-T's dusty window, his hands clenched in his lap, watches the prairie stretch out around them, burning red and white and gold.

 

+

 

Benjen lives in a tiny apartment on the fringes of Dallas, just two shitty rooms above a laundromat, right up against the east bank of the Trinity. Jon can see West Dallas through the broken kitchen window, can smell the thick, acrid smoke from Cement City as he lies on Benjen's couch, staring at the ceiling when he should be asleep.

Jon finishes school, learns to drive, buses tables at Marco's until the Depression shuts it down. He doesn't meet a girl, but he doesn't really try; Benjen has made it very clear they don't have room for one more.

Letters trickle in from Chicago, bringing news Jon wishes he didn't still care about. Robb is considering college, and Sansa is engaged to the mayor's oldest son. Arya wants to join the army, the doctors are sure Bran will never walk, Rickon doesn't quite remember who Jon is.

He joins the police force a few days after he turns eighteen, sweltering in the Texas heat as he takes his oath in Chief Mormont's tiny, windowless office. Mormont doesn't mention Jon's arrest; his father must have paid someone, had it buried deep.

"You'll get no favors for being my nephew," Benjen says, his duster folded over his arm. The Dallas police don't have uniforms; they shoot their own guns, drive their own cars, buy their own gas. "Everyone is expected to pull their own weight."

Ned Stark dies as Jon is tracking a car thief through West Dallas, trudging down the littered dirt alleys with a new guy named Sam, a fat kid from St. Paul who seems afraid of his own shadow. The papers don't mention the mayor's wife, but she's a Lannister, and the Lannisters are the kind of upper class crime family people don't call crime families, the kind that can afford bullets in the dark, and Ned had been asking too many questions, had been trying to right too many wrongs.

 

+

 

Winters are different in Dallas, clearer skies than Chicago and almost no snow, but it gets cold enough from time to time, freezes when the winds blow in from the north. 

Benjen disappears just after Christmas, heads out to Cement City to meet with an informant and doesn't come back. Mormont grouses under his breath, frowns out the window as the days become weeks and months; he sends men to fish the Trinity, has them search for Benjen door to door, but the people in Cement City have never heard a noise they couldn't ignore, have never had a conversation they didn't forget before it even started.

Ned Stark's death is officially classified as a murder, but it isn't investigated too hard, gets buried under the rest of Robert Baratheon's dirt. Robb calls Jon from Chicago the night before Sansa marries Joffrey, his voice thin and reedy on the laundromat's crackly party line, and Jon listens as Robb says he's skipping college to join the Chicago police force, as he swears he'll get justice for their father.

The apartment is strange and empty without Benjen, and Jon takes up smoking because he misses the smell. He still sleeps on the couch, doesn't want to admit that Benjen is dead.

 

+

 

"Stark," Thorne barks, his voice gruff, his fedora tipped over his eye like he thinks he's Jimmy Cagney. The day is promising to be hot, the sun bright as it slices in through the window at Thorne's back. "You're getting a new partner. I've decided your fat ass friend would be better off behind a desk."

Jon doesn't say anything, knows arguing with Thorne is like howling at the wind. He's grown to like Sam over the last year, has coffee with him at Hargrave's when both of them can afford it; Sam is less nervous than he used to be, but he still second guesses himself, is still afraid to shoot, will probably get killed if he stays on the streets.

Qhorin is an older guy, tall and solidly built, had been a Ranger before he lost half his hand chasing cattle rustlers across the border. He's quiet in a way that reminds Jon of Benjen, drives a Model-T in slightly better shape than the one Jon sold to make up Benjen's part of the rent.

"We're headed downtown," Qhorin says, flicking a spent cigarette into the street as he slides into the truck. "I got word that Mance Rayder's gang is fixing to hold up a mail truck."

 

+

 

They find the mail truck parked on Swiss Avenue, show up just as guns are being drawn. 

Jon shoots a grifter named Orell, leaning over the Model-T, his arm braced on the hood; the blast cracks the early morning air like a whip, and Mance's people scatter down the street, leave two kids holding the bag -- a tall guy called Longspear and a girl with bright red hair and crooked teeth.

The mail is Federal business, not something the police are supposed to worry about, but Qhorin spits whenever someone mentions the Bureau, has never been the type to worry about shit like jurisdiction. He hustles them into the back of the Model-T, their hands tied to the hooks lining the bed, says he might as well question them while he waits for Hoover's pencilnecks to drive up from San Antonio. 

Jon stands in the corner of what passes for the interrogation room, sweats as Qhorin smokes cigarette after cigarette, tries to get Longspear to roll on Mance's operation. The letter in Jon's vest pocket is the latest from Robb; he thinks Cersei Lannister killed their father, has arrested Cersei's brother on suspicion, mentions a couple of kids Robert fathered outside his marriage, sketches out a conspiracy involving another dead alderman named Arryn that Jon can't quite wrap his head around.

"Stark," Qhorin says suddenly, scratching his beard with his shortened hand. "Go talk to the girl."

She's curled up on a bench in the hallway, her hands cuffed to a length of pipe jutting out of the wall. She looks up when Jon sits down beside her; her eyes are too far apart, and she has freckles dusting her short nose, wears her hair longer than the current fashion, curling well past her chin.

"What's your name?" 

Her mouth twists, not quite a smile. "Ygritte."

Qhorin shouts in the other room, his voice rising sharply and then falling, and the bench creaks as Jon shifts, leans his elbows on his knees.

"You never arrested a woman before, did you?" Ygritte asks, narrowing her eyes.

Jon frowns at his hands, at the dirt following the bend of his thumb. He's questioned a few molls in the last year, but they were all harmless, just hungry girls who'd got mixed up with bad men, who'd tried to escape the Depression the only way they could. Ygritte had been holding a gun on the postman when they arrived, had been pulling the trigger when Jon caught her around the throat.

"A mail truck is a pretty big job," Jon says quietly. "How much were you looking to take?" 

"I ain't a rat," she snaps, lifting her chin. Her dress is dark grey, the wrap-around kind bought at a five and dime, and her skin is pale underneath it, smooth at the hollow of her throat. "Longspear ain't either. You laws are just wasting your time."

"You'll go to prison." 

"I didn't shoot nobody. If I did go, they wouldn't keep me more than two years," she says sharply. "I ain't afraid."

"You should be," Jon says, sighing under his breath. Goree State isn't as brutal or bloody as the men's farm at Eastham, but it is bad enough, forced labor and little sleep and wardens who talk with a whip. "If you tell me what the game was, I can help you."

"Could help me anyway, if you really wanted," Ygritte says, her mouth twitching. She twists on the bench, slides her thigh against Jon's. "If I'm having a baby, I won't go to no Goree. They'll stick me in Huntsville, and I won't even be there a year."

Jon shifts down the bench a little, looks away from her wide, curious eyes. "That's not funny."

"I wasn't being funny," she says, her voice throaty and low. "I wouldn't mind all that much. You're pretty enough."

Jon glances down the hallway, where Sam is hunched over his desk, talking on the phone with one hand and tapping a message into the wire service with the other. Jon's hands shake as he fits the key into her cuffs; she frowns at him, bites her lip as she rubs the creases in her wrists with slim fingers.

"Get out of here," he hisses, jerking his head toward the back door. There's supposed to be a guard on it, but Noyle usually takes his coffee about this time. "Hurry."

"You're letting me off? Just like that?" She tilts her head, narrows her eyes. "Why?" 

Jon doesn't know. His head hurts and his cock is hard; he wants a cigarette, needs a drink. 

"Go. Before I change my mind."

She leans into him, presses her mouth to his jaw before she runs down the hallway.

 

+

 

Robb dies in a bootleg bust gone bad, gunned down by some guys from the Bolton operation who'd been tipped off about the raid. Jon reads about it over his morning coffee, his fingers trembling as he traces grainy newspaper shots of a derelict warehouse and sprawled bodies covered in sheets. He folds the paper in half to hide the photo of Robb's widow, a slender, sad-eyed girl named Jeyne who Jon had never met.

He spends the afternoon on the wrong side of the viaduct, chainsmoking in the Model-T, watching a crumbling shanty in West Dallas for a player in Mance's gang called Jarl. Without Ygritte the case against Longspear had fallen apart; the postman had only remembered her red hair, hadn't know Longspear from a stranger on the street.

Mance's gang has pulled four new jobs since then: two filling stations, a mom and pop grocery, and a hardware store around the corner from Jon's new place, a daily hotel even smaller than Benjen's old apartment, dirtier and closer to the Trinity.

"We need to figure out what he's up to," Qhorin says, the sun dipping behind the smokestacks in Cement City, painting everything yellow and red. "Mance is too smart for this five and dime shit."

"Don't we have informants?" Jon asks, lighting another cigarette. His chest will ache by the time he heads home tonight, but it's calming him, gives him something to do with his hands. 

Qhorin snorts, takes a furtive sip from his hip-flask. "Born liars, all of them. They only trusted your uncle, and I doubt they told him even half the truth."

The door to the shanty creaks open, framing a short girl with blonde hair and soft curves. She stands on what passes for the porch for a few moments, throwing corn to the chickens pecking around the scrubby garden; if she knows she's being watched, she doesn't show it.

"We need to get closer," Qhorin says, tucking the flask back in the glove compartment. "We need to get someone inside."

 

+

 

Ygritte isn't hard to find -- not with hair that color, with a smile that bright. A few questions and a few dimes tell him everything he needs to know; she keeps a tent in West Dallas but doesn't sleep there very often, has a job three days a week, waiting tables at a greasy spoon on the fringes of Cement City.

She narrows her eyes as he sits down at the counter, keeps her distance as she pours him a coffee. "Never thought I'd see you again."

"Do you mind?" he asks, wrapping his hands around his mug. 

"Depends on what you're after."

She leans her hip against the counter, wipes her hands on her apron. Her hair is tucked behind her ears, and her uniform is garish, yellow with green stripes, does nothing for her coloring.

"Where did you come from?" he asks, reaching for the sugar. She's too fierce and proud to be a local; people born in West Dallas come into the world defeated, have hunched shoulders and hollow eyes before they draw their first breath. "Somewhere up north?" 

"Montana."

Jon sips his coffee; it's thicker than mud, hot enough that the skin above his lip breaks out into a sweat. "What's it like there?" 

"Boring," she says sharply. "Nothing but sheep and snow." She frowns at him, drums her fingers on the counter. "What do you want?" 

"I want to know what Mance is planning."

"I already told you, I ain't no rat."

He leans across the counter, catching her arm as she pulls away.

"You don't understand," Jon says quietly. He slides his hand down to her wrist, brushes his thumb over the flutter of her pulse. "I want in."

 

+

 

Mance lives in an abandoned farmhouse just outside Telico; Ygritte drives him there in a V8 coupe that's probably stolen, dusty windows and Iowa plates and a pair of Browning automatics waiting on the back seat. It's well into the evening as they pull onto the cat road that leads out of West Dallas; Ygritte hums to herself, tapping her thumbs on the steering wheel, and Jon smokes out the window, watches the sky empty of color with a knot in his throat and an ache in his chest.

The farmhouse tilts like a drunk, its windows yawning without glass, the porch creaking and sighing in complaint under Jon's feet. He hitches his bag over his shoulder, the same bag he'd tossed into the back of Benjen's Model-T three years ago, has a gun in his gut before the door is even open.

"Let him by, Styr."

"He's a cop," Styr spits, giving Jon another jab.

Ygritte snorts. "What, you ain't never heard of a dirty one?" 

Jon smells dust and gunpowder, follows Styr and Ygritte up a rickety staircase, ignores the sickly twist in his belly. Mance is older than Jon expects, has grey in his hair and creases in his forehead; he's seated on a faded, sagging couch when they enter, considers Jon with a slow, speculative frown. The room is stuffy and crowded with people, mostly men, a small handful of women.

"What's this?" Mance asks, wrapping his arm around the blonde girl beside him.

"A cop," Styr says, pointing at Jon with his gun. "He tailed us here."

"He didn't tail nobody," Ygritte snaps, her voice sharp and shrill as she rounds on Styr. "I brought him."

Mance sits up a little, slides his hand over the gun resting on the arm of the couch. "Why would you bring a cop here?" 

"I'm looking for work," Jon says quickly.

"I'm not sure I believe that," Mance says, each word edged like a knife. "You're not really the type, Jon Stark."

"How--"

"You look a good deal like your old man," Mance says, cocking his head to the side. "I was in Chicago when he announced his campaign. I ate dinner a few seats down from your uncle." He pauses for a moment, drums his fingers on the butt of the gun. "Word is, you're a straight cop. Your uncle was a straight cop. Your father was the only clean alderman Chicago's ever had."

"He was," Jon says darkly, his stomach thick and roiling. "All it did was get him killed."

The room is silent; Jon can hear his heartbeat, Ygritte breathing beside him, people moving around downstairs.

"If Jarl can bring his woman in," Ygritte says, pointing at a woman in the corner of the room, the blonde with the shanty in West Dallas, "I don't see why I can't bring in my man."

Mance snorts out a laugh like a gunshot. "Is that how it is?" 

"Yes," Jon says firmly, letting Ygritte catch his hand, thread her fingers with his.

"Take him downstairs, Styr," Mance says, offering Jon something close to a smile. "If he's going to run with us, he'll need a better gun."

 

+

 

Jon keeps his head down, only speaks when he's spoken to, listens to every word that's said around him. He eventually learns that Mance is planning a train heist, a monthly cash shipment for the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Dallas; it's the kind of job a guy can retire on, if he doesn't mind moving to Mexico or Cuba, but it's complicated, requires more men than Mance has got, more discipline than Jon expects from a group of beggars and grifters and thieves.

The guys in the gang leave Jon alone, unsure if they should trust him or not. Styr and Jarl ignore him completely, Longspear is gruff but polite, and Tormund is nice enough, the kind of fellow who only got into crime because he was tired of watching the Depression starve his kids. Only Rattleshirt shows any hostility, reaching for the knives lining his vest whenever Jon walks into the room, but Ygritte just shrugs it off like it's nothing, just tells him to ignore it.

"Old Lord of Knives hates everyone," she says, cigarette smoke curling out through her nose. "Especially them who weren't born in The Bog."

Jon manages to avoid Ygritte for four days, feigning sleep when she stretches out beside him on his mattress. He's never been with a woman, didn't need kids to feed when he could barely pay his rent; he keeps his breathing even when she strokes her small hand up and down his back, ignores the way his cock throbs and aches when she presses soft kisses to base of his neck.

On the fifth night she shakes him by the shoulder, hard enough that it would've woken him if he'd really been asleep. She's as naked as the day she was born, and she smiles as she tugs his pyjamas down to his knees, as she throws her leg over his waist, her eyes wide and dark, her hands warm against his chest.

"I don't get you," Ygritte says, stroking her hand over the hollow of his throat. "Is it that you don't like girls, or you don't like me?"

He slides hands up her thighs, digs his thumbs into the creases of her hips, unable to stop touching her now that he's started. Her breasts are small but perfect for her body, her nipples dark pink, already hard; she shifts against him, her cunt pressed hot and wet to his skin, and when her ass rubs against his cock a moan catches in the back of his throat, low and rough and urgent.

"Well, look at that," she says, her laughter sharp in the darkness, brighter than her hair. "I guess you -- you ain't done it before."

Jon runs his hands up her sides, trails his fingers over the curves of her breasts. "No."

"Don't worry," she says, rubbing back against his cock again. "I'll show you how it's done."

She leans down and kisses him, her breasts pressing against his chest, her hands knotting into his hair, her tongue pushing into his mouth. He strokes his hands up her back, pulling her closer, his breath catching as she nips at his lip; she drags her mouth along his jaw as she slips down onto his cock, and he forgets that Mormont is depending on him, that Qhorin is trusting him, that Sam is waiting for information. 

It happens once more during the night, her hand wrapping around his cock before she crawls back into his lap, and again in the morning, Jarl banging on the door as Jon thrusts into her, her legs around his waist and her mouth at his ear, her voice soft and sweet as she tells him what she likes, where she wants him to touch her, how good he feels inside her.

She leaves a mark on his neck, a slow ache hidden just below his ear, and he touches it as he drinks his coffee, as he smokes a cigarette on the porch, as he loads his gun and climbs into her car.

 

+

 

Mance gives Jon a brand new Thompson and the keys to a stolen Hudson with no back window and Louisiana plates.

He drives getaway on two filling station jobs, stands lookout when they knock over an all-night diner, holds his gun on the manager when they hit the laundromat below Benjen's old apartment. The takes are pretty small -- a couple hundred here, a couple hundred there -- but Jon knows they're just biding their time, just keeping their guns and stomachs and gas tanks full until Mance finishes setting up the train job.

They hit a bank in Cement City at the end of September, Longspear at the wheel and Ygritte guarding the door, Jon on the inside with Styr and Jarl. They get the money in under two minutes, grab enough hostages to cover their escape, but the police are pulling up as they head outside, three cars and nine men, Pyp and Grenn and Sam and Edd, guys Jon has worked and drank with, people he knows. 

Ygritte narrowly misses a shot to the chest, and Jarl takes a bullet through the throat. Jon returns fire because he must, because the gang will know he's a plant if he does not, and he grits his teeth as Sam ducks, as Grenn shouts and grabs his arm, as Qhorin collapses to the ground. Longspear takes a wound to the shoulder, alive but unable to drive, and Jon shoves him out of the way as he climbs behind the wheel, burns the cat roads back to Telico faster than is safe, the tires spitting gravel and dirt around every curve and bend.

He fucks Ygritte up against the wall in their room at the farmhouse, his mouth at her neck and his fingers biting into her hips, panting against her skin as she twists and gasps and claws at his arms, as she digs her heel into his thigh hard enough to bruise.

There's four thousand dollars on the dresser, twenties and fifties and hundred, more money than Jon has ever seen in his life. He can't swallow the hot, aching knot in his throat, feels like Qhorin's blood is still on his hands.

 

+

 

The trouble starts six months after Jon joins the gang, three months after the bank shootout in Cement City. Jon is no longer sure if he wants his old life back, doesn't think he could have it if he did.

Mance puts the men off whenever the train heist is brought up, just shrugs and says he needs more information, that he's waiting on a dame named Harma who knows a guy on the inside. The men don't argue, reply with all the right things, but they grumble when they think no one is listening, hoard bullets and guns, cast dark looks in Mance's direction.

"It's that bitch of his," Rattleshirt growls one night, when he comes out to the porch while Jon is smoking a cigarette. "He's gone soft since Dalla got knocked up."

The days stretch into weeks, and the food and ammunition run low, and a Blue Northerner blows in from Canada, howling as it gusts in through the cracks and chinks in the farmhouse's walls. The men grow restless, holding their weapons close, and Jon barely sleeps, walks around with his head throbbing and his eyes burning and his skin pulled to tight. 

He sends a postcard to Sam, saying the train job has been postponed, checks the newspaper every day, never sees an ad in the Classifieds with a reply.

It happens when Jon is in the kitchen; he doesn't see how it starts, doesn't hear who said what. Ygritte screams as he's measuring coffee into the percolator, sharp and choked and terrified, and Jon runs upstairs, finds Rattleshirt holding her by the arm, snarling as he swings his knife at her throat.

Jon fires his pistol without thinking, clips Rattleshirt in the back of the head, just below the ear.

They're nearly alone in the farmhouse; Mance is out back working on one of the cars, and Dalla is across the hall with her sister, Val, the girl with the shanty in West Dallas, something Jon had witnessed in another life. Rattleshirt is dead, had been before he'd hit the ground, his blood running in thick, red rivers across the floor, pooling darkly at Ygritte's feet.

"Move," she snaps, pushing him out the door.

The Hudson has half a tank of gas, a Thompson in the trunk, two Brownings in the backseat. Jon sticks to the cat lanes until they're outside of Dallas, pulls over long enough to switch the plates with some from a car abandoned on the side of the road. Ygritte lights a cigarette and tucks her hair behind her ears; Jon catches the main road just before Plano, his heart hammering in his chest as they roar toward Oklahoma.

 

+

 

They knock over a butcher shop in Lawton, hit two filling stations in Edmond, break into a hardware store in Enid because the Thompson is jammed and they're low on ammunition for the Brownings. They pick up a few more guns, steal a car in Claremore when the Hudson blows a tire, a flashy V8 with swooping fenders and more room in the trunk. They never end up with much cash, just enough to eat and fill the tank, sometimes enough for a motor court or motel.

They sleep in the car more often than not, Jon fucking her in the backseat, her leg hooked over the cushions and her hand pressed to the steamy window. One night outside Pryor he comes well before she does, thrusting into her hard and fast, his blood still thrumming from the grocery store job they just did, from the shot he nearly took when the manager pulled a gun on him. He slides down the seat and puts his mouth on her, unsure of what he's doing but encouraged by the noises she's making, by the way she's tugging on his hair, the way she's arching and twisting, pushing her cunt against his face.

Jon is hard again by the time he's done; he pulls her into his lap, watches her back arch as she rides him, drags his wet mouth over her skin as he licks and sucks her nipples, kisses the dip between her breasts. 

She takes a shot after they cross into Arkansas, when the police catch them running out of a laundromat in Fayetteville. The bullet lodges in the meat of her shoulder, the hole losing blood fast enough to make her dizzy, and she screams as he digs it out with the bent end of a coat hanger, as he sears the wound closed with a piece of metal he heated in a campfire.

They spend the next two days in a motel, Jon stretched out on the bed with Ygritte curled against his side. He stares up at the ceiling, strokes his hand over her back, considers going straight as he listens to her breathe.

He thinks they could do it, if they went far enough west, if she dyed her hair, if he changed his name to something common like Sand or Waters or Snow.

 

+

 

It's the middle of February by the time they reach Missouri, the air thin and sharp, the sky bleak and dark, heavy with clouds.

They pick up a guy just over the border, a drifter named Theon who's looking for a ride to Joplin. He's a few years older than Jon, tall and thin with dark hair and a narrow face, and Jon can't shake the feeling that he knows him from somewhere, has met him before. They stay in Joplin for three days, sleeping in a motor court on the outskirts of town, and when they pack up the car -- a black Studebaker, stolen in Galena because Jon ran the V8 into a ditch -- Theon offers to ride along.

Jon doesn't like the idea, can't find a good reason to refuse.

They hit two banks in a matter of days, the first in Carthage, the second in Monett. The Carthage job goes off without a hitch -- they grab the money in less than two minutes, are back in the car before the police are called -- but in Monett the manager trips an alarm, and Theon shoots him as they're running out the door.

Jon stops the car at an all-night diner in Kirksville; they split the money in the parking lot, Jon's hands shaking as he counts it out. Together, he and Ygritte have close to eighteen grand, more than enough to go straight, to start over some place like New Mexico or Nevada.

Ygritte goes into the diner for a cup of coffee, and Theon slides his gun underneath Jon's jaw. 

"I know who you are," Theon says quietly. "You're Robb Stark's brother."

"Theon Greyjoy," Jon says, remembering everything he'd forgotten about Chicago. Theon's hair had been shorter then, his face a bit fuller. "You were Robb's best friend."

"I was, yeah," Theon replies. He leans closer, nudges Jon with the gun. "Until he joined the force and realized my family was as dirty as the Lannisters."

Jon's gun is on the passenger seat, just out of reach. "What do you want?" 

"Your take from the bank job, and whatever else you've got."

Jon nods slightly, starts gathering up the money. He doesn't see Ygritte until she's reaching through the window, until her fist is slamming into the side of Theon's face. 

 

+

 

Jon sees his picture in the paper in a restaurant in Springdale, spills his coffee on the table as he sets it down, a sharp ache digging into his gut. It's an older shot, from his early days on the Dallas police force; it's been cropped down to just him, but he remembers the day it was taken, knows that Sam is standing on his right side, Benjen on his left. He finishes his breakfast, pays in small bills, walks back to the motel with a knot burning in his throat.

Ygritte is still asleep; he packs his bag in silence, leaves her half the money and most of the guns, drops the car keys on the dresser, figures he can steal another one while he's walking down the road. He turns back to look at her one last time, finds her sitting up in the bed, the sheet slipping down to her waist, her hair curling wildly around her face.

"You tired of me already?" she asks, her hands twisting in the sheet. 

"I love you," he says quietly.

"You got a funny way of showing it."

He digs the newspaper out of his bag, tosses it onto the bed. She frowns at it for a moment, then shrugs and brushes the paper to the floor.

"I told you to kill him," she says, her mouth twisting. 

Jon sighs under his breath, rubs his hand over his face. "I probably should've." He'd considered it as they dumped Theon on the side of the road, had decided he didn't want another murder on his hands; he's never thought twice about Rattleshirt, but Qhorin haunts him every day. "I thought he wanted the money. I didn't think he'd roll on me."

"His family's dirty, ain't it?" She pushes the sheet down a little, enough that Jon can see the tops of her thighs, the bright hair curling around her cunt. "He's probably got a warrant. Might've thought you'd get him a pardon."

Jon sets his bag on the floor, lights a cigarette, puffs smoke up towards the greyish ceiling, unable to think.

"You still ain't told me why you were trying to leave me," Ygritte says sharply.

"You'd be safer without me," Jon says, his chest aching and hollow. "Theon gave them your name, but they don't have your picture. If you dyed your hair, you--"

"I ain't dying my hair."

"The cops will be after me, and--"

"I don't care."

"Ygritte, please," Jon says, stubbing is cigarette in the ashtray on the dresser. "Listen to me."

"I might listen, if you were making any sense," she snaps, climbing out of the bed. He watches as she walks toward him, his hands itching to touch her. He wants to map the hollow of her throat, trace the curve of her hip, curl his fingers into her cunt. She strokes her thumb over his jaw, presses it to the well of his lip. "You don't know anything, if you thought I'd just let you run off."

She kisses him, knotting her hand in his hair as she pushes her tongue into his mouth, and he carries her back to the bed, licks her cunt until she begs him to stop, fucks her until they're both too tired to move.

 

+

 

They pull out of Springdale in the morning, cross into Oklahoma by early afternoon, stop in Sallisaw long enough to steal a new car. 

It's nearly March; the air is crisp and the sky is finally starting to clear. Ygritte curls up at his side, sips gin from a flask, yawns as they approach the road to Oklahoma City.

"I love you too," she says quietly, resting her head on his shoulder.

Jon lights a cigarette, heads west, figures they can be in California in four or five days.


End file.
